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The attacks on U.S. missions abroad this week have been a test for Google's "bias in favor of free expression."

Wednesday morning must have been a nightmare for the people who work at YouTube. Late the night before, angry demonstrators had attacked the U.S. missions in Cairo and Egypt, killing four Americans, purportedly provoked by an American-made video that villified and mocked Muhammad. That video, like pretty much all videos these days, was available on YouTube, a site where Google (which owns YouTube) has the power to block access to content on a country-by-country basis. By midday Wednesday, the company had decided that that was just what it was going to do.

A YouTube spokesperson explained via email:

We work hard to create a community everyone can enjoy and which also enables people to express different opinions. This can be a challenge because what's OK in one country can be offensive elsewhere. This video -- which is widely available on the Web -- is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube. However, given the very difficult situation in Libya and Egypt we have temporarily restricted access in both countries. Our hearts are with the families of the people murdered in Tuesday's attack in Libya.

YouTube is in a tough spot here. It certainly doesn't want to play any part, even an indirect one, in fueling violence that has already resulted in four American deaths. But censoring the video also cuts against Google's stated ideology, which has a "bias in favor of free expression -- not just because it's a key tenet of free societies, but also because more information generally means more choice, more power, more economic opportunity and more freedom for people." Google's top leaders have championed the power of the Internet to make society more free by making the Internet more free, and the company has been a vocal and constant critic of China's efforts to control what people do and say online. In certain instances, Google has prominently defied a government's request to remove content, such as when it protected videos documenting police brutality here in the United States.